“Canadians in general need to feel like they can be successful at scale. I think we need to have some courage. We also need to recognize our value, and that I think is where sustainable scale will come from.”

Heather’s one of the most experienced marketers in the region, and I’m grateful to her for finding time in her packed schedule to meet with me—because in addition to her role at P&P Optica, Heather is…

We met a few years ago, when I started participating in a regular get-together of senior marketers in the region (which Heather ran as part of her Communitech gig), but we’d never sat down one-on-one to chat in-depth about marketing until this week.

It was a real joy, and I intend to have Heather back on the ‘program’ again in the future!

(for those who want to queue it up for future listening, here’s the mp3)

[1:46] A brief discussion about P&P Optica’s interesting history, their amazing solution that’s making our food safer and healthier, and Heather’s role as VP, Marketing as the company moves into a new market and is looking to expand significantly: “They spent the first 15, 16 years working on figuring how to make what is now the core tech that supports what we do. It’s super cool…and one of my first jobs here was to try and take really scientific language and turn it into something I could explain to my mom.”

“One of my first jobs here was to try and take really scientific language and turn it into something I could explain to my mom.”

[5:27] How PPO chose the Food & Beverage industry as their initial target market, ahead of healthcare, mining, petroleum, and others, including space exploration: “One of our spectrometers is on the moon.”

[8:09] Why PPO identifies as a Food & Beverage company, rather than some meaningless and misguided tech label: “Think about that as a marketing exercise: who do I want to talk to? I don’t need to talk to the tech companies. I need to talk to my customer—and my customer is going to look for companies in food and beverage.”

“Think about that as a marketing exercise: who do I want to talk to? I don’t need to talk to the tech companies. I need to talk to my customer—and my customer is going to look for companies in food and beverage.”

[8:54] Why even folks in the local community likely haven’t heard of P&P Optica, and whether or not that matters to the company: “When I joined last September, one of the things we talked about was ‘how do we build ourselves as a brand in Waterloo?’ Because we’re gonna need to grow; we have a very aggressive hiring plan this year.”

[11:37] Heather’s philosophy as an instructor for the marketers of tomorrow, and how she’s trying to bring a workplace leadership approach to instruction: “A lot of these students had never had the experience of having a real people leader—having expectations set, being given feedback—which is kind’ve how it works in the business world.”

“So I walked into the classroom and said, ‘I’m going to treat you like I would treat my team. I’m gonna expectations for you and feed you back like I would if you were working for me, and we’re going to work together to build up your skills in this safe environment.'”

[15:35] Heather’s role at Communitech as a growth coach: “Basically, I’m working with some of our earlier stage companies and helping them to figure out their marketing strategies, their sales strategies, and their overall…what are they doing. And getting down into the weeds with them sometimes. Anything from big strategic conversations down to the tactics and the weeds.”

[17:23] The announcement by the Prime Minister to fund a Scale-Up Platform, Heather’s observations about scaling challenges our companies are experiencing, and some of my own research findings about growing pains and the walking dead: “There’s a tonne of research on how to do a startup, but the idea of actually building for scale is not nearly as well documented.”

“A lot of those companies that are ready for scale are looking at a few things—one is, from a technology perspective, they’ve built to solve the problem to get them where they are, but they’ve also created this enormous either technical debt that they have to get past to allow them to scale, or they’ve created a product that can’t get a whole lot bigger without falling apart. A lot of these companies also don’t know how to scale their culture. And you can’t scale your tech without scaling your people. So leadership skills are missing, or they’re in particular silos.”

[21:27] Why many companies struggle to scale sales and marketing in particular, which echoes my own experiences trying to help smaller companies extend beyond demand generation into sales enablement: “A lot of the founders that I work with don’t necessarily have a good understanding of how sales and marketing work together and how they build that into an engine.”

[27:33] The (general) differences between experienced and inexperienced founders, and the advantages that experienced founders have

[30:16] Heather’s wild ride and major contributions through the enormous ups and dramatic downs of her decade at Research in Motion / BlackBerry

[37:46] Her time helping to grow Kik, and overseeing essentially every outward-facing function, including marketing, customer support, privacy, and recruiting: “I was kinda the only person when I started there who had that external-facing role and sat at the leadership table, so I became the voice of the customer, the candidates, the market…so I owned it all.”

[41:10] How the Waterloo Region tech scene has changed over the years, and how the Canadian tech community as a whole is learning what it takes to compete on the global stage: “What I see is that there’s a maturity here that wasn’t here in 2001…understanding who we are, what we do, why we are important.”

“There’s a maturity here that wasn’t here in 2001…understanding who we are, what we do, why we are important.”

[46:14] The knowledge, experience, and resources available to the region’s start-ups and entrepreneurs, whether or not it’s being leveraged sufficiently, and what else we need: “I think there’s a pretty rich level of knowledge in this community in certain things, and where it exists I think it’s being grabbed. But what I also see is: we need more. We need to expand our knowledge, make it richer, make it broader—particularly around things like sales and marketing, and leadership. We just don’t have enough.”

“We don’t have enough people here—across lots of different functions—who’ve actually successfully scaled companies and exited those companies.”

[50:01] What it will take for Canadian companies to be more successful: “Canadians in general need to feel like they can be successful at scale. I think we need to have some courage. We also need to recognize our value, and that I think is where sustainable scale will come from.”